Storage facilities for manufacturing companies, vendors, and the like nowadays can measure more than one million square feet, oftentimes spanning multiple buildings. Products and supplies that are used by manufacturers during a manufacturing process or maintained by vendors are typically kept in tool cribs, vending machines, containers, and other storage bins, for example. These example storage bins for storing product are known in the art. Further, these storage bins come in many shapes and sizes, but typically have a bottom, two opposed side walls, a front section, and a rear section. At least one of the front and rear sections generally has a height lower than a height of the side walls to form at least one bin opening through which product can be added and removed as necessary.
In some respects, large storage facilities are cost-efficient in that a considerable portion or even all of a manufacturer's or a vendor's inventory can be stored in one location. Yet a major problem with large storage facilities is that an individual attempting to retrieve product from a storage bin must traverse a considerable distance before arriving at the desired storage bin—only to find that inventory for that product is insufficient or exhausted. Thus employees of large storage facilities and manufacturing plants waste untold sums of time because they do not have a reliable way of monitoring the inventory of product within storage bins before proceeding to the locations of the storage bins.
Attempts to date to address this problem have proven fruitless. For example, methods of tracking each individual product in inventory, such as by incorporating radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags in each product, for example, are expensive. By way of further example, visual cues are also problematic because they often require individuals to walk the floors in search of them.